I don’t wish to make too dispiriting a start, but as I sat down to write this review, there was Isaiah Berlin all up in my grill, bitching on about relativism. But I’m just a twat, and he’s famous and dead, so you’ve got to give his thoughts respect. I’m an audience of one and my perception of this pub, which will become a reality of sorts for those reading my words, is a twisted thing, a split definitive. All I got is my eyes, man, and they’re busy things, looking for clues to make sense of a scene without me even noticing – and who knows what prior information they’re relying on to bring order to life’s chaos. By which I mean to say – I don’t know what’s true, what’s real and, most saliently, whether you’d like it here. Because I don’t even know whether I like it here.
There, that’s cleared things up.
Thanks, the British Pub Guide, for your wonderful photograph.
For the first time I visited here, it was a quiet Wednesday lunchtime, the sole other customers a pair of ruddy-faced, slickly bohemian gents of about 50, chatting away in a self-contained yet louche manner – after all, they were in a pub, on a Wednesday, making their way through a bottle of red. The girl behind the bar was most welcoming, and we drank strong cider. Lunch was taken in the dining area, where gilded mirrors and witty wall-hangings abounded – and at the far end, a splendid glass window into the Operations Room, where I could spy on the man sizzling my bacon.
My BLT arrived on a wooden board, with a small pot of mustard and a sharp knife resting alongside. What fantastic presentation; simple victuals rendered with consideration. Top marks.
A second visit was a rather less cosy affair – a Thursday evening, the place was rammed. The bar area had become a thoroughfare between the dining room and toilets for a panoply of skin-tightened, unguent-smothered, quiffy, whiffy well-breds, the ladies dressed in fuck-you boots, the men in that stranglingly annoying combo of jean, checked shirt (collar upturned) and blazer. They were all really quite noisy, and slightly intemperate towards those in their way, y’know, just at the bar waiting to get served…
The food – and, more to the point, its prices – was in recession denial. £12 for posh fish and chips is a big ask in penny-pinching Brizzle, and even more of a pain when you realise that they’ve had the anti-great idea of battering monkfish. So, the poor sap that orders it ends up with a few, insubstantial twigs of ecologically suspect scampi, accompanied by some soft potato wedges. The ginger beer taken to wash this feast down is so horrifyingly expensive that it pushes your bill nearer a score than a tenner… while you sit there surrounded by the contemptuous bürgers of Redland.
Like I said, it’s an exercise in psychological relativism. Overall message: aspects of the place irk and please, times change, timing is important, it’s all a big guessing game, I like bacon, the end.
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